Felicity (n): happiness: state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy "What if a city is built on a foundation of happiness?" The FeliCity ...

Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the multi-chromatic Torre Agbar Tower in Barcelona and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in ...

Metabolism started in Tokyo in the sixties, coinciding roughly with the activities of other experimental and theoretical urban cell-groups, like Archigram and its "plug-in city" projects. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square layouts, claiming that ...

I woke up one morning – it was a Saturday – and checked my email before 8am as usual and found an email written to me by a presumably young and enthusiastic reader of architecture. The content ...

2007 was a year of massive change. Quoting Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries, “Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a ...

East Tokyo, around the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, is where throngs of men in suits gather in packs on weekday evenings, for after-work drinking sessions at Tokyo’s izakaya (essentially pubs with better food). There isn’t much else to do in this part of the city. People work, and get fed and watered after they’re done. It’s a two-sided economy. Meanwhile, across town in West Tokyo, there is a creative ghetto, centered in what some people still call the ‘high city’. It’s a corridor of fairly gentrified areas like Harajuku, Shibuya and Ebisu. There are cafes, design studios, and boutiques strewn up and down the Yamanote Line that connects these towns. Some of Tokyo’s more brazen and plasticky architecture, the fantastic concrete and cyberpunk towers that emerged out of a string of foreign commissions from the Bubble Eighties, mostly got built in the west of the city.

ArchiFest is an Architectural Design Festival that celebrates the built environment and preludes the Singapore Architecture Biennale 2010. Held annually, it is a platform for all walks of life to discuss, debate and deliberate architectural issues. Participants will find themselves engaging in uninhibited dialogue, creative collaborations and a constant exchange of ideas.

It was only this morning that I read about Robert Campbell's (of Architectural Record Magazine) wish to experience architecture 'with seven senses, not one'. He very rightly supplied a quote from Juhani Pallasmaa: “Instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.” Campbell was speaking about how some specific examples of recent architecture in North America no longer engaged all vehicles of the human senses; but instead sought to impress upon only one: that of the visual. Campbell's collumn left a somewhat sour aftertaste, saying, "Maybe someday, architecture won’t be up to the architects at all. Driving along in our bean-sprout-fueled cars, we’ll simply flip a switch to create our own environment. The same building will be Palladio for me, Goff for you."

So you think, after a couple of months in the studio, you're a veteran now, huh? In our first edition of Archi School for Dummies, we managed to bring you the bread and butter of survival in the studios. But in order to rise above the frenzy that is the sleeping bag-filled, junk food-smelling, UHU glu-sniffing studio, here's 10 more tips for surviving in the architecture school wilderness:

While it is impossible to predict what architecture will look like in the future, the conditions that will shape the creation of future architecture is relatively clear. The role of the star architect who controls and designs every component of the building is disappearing if not gone. Instead, as Tapscott and Williams (2007) proposes in Wikinomics, the convergence of technology, demographics and global economics is giving rise to a fundamentally new way of creation and organising resources- mass collaboration. Complex products such as software operating systems, medical research and even vehicles are being produced through such means and to a certain degree, so is architecture. Today, various professions and suppliers come together to realise the creation of a building and from a general survey of the conditions affecting architecture, it is clear that the conception of architecture is going to be an increasingly collaborative effort among an even wider group of people.